Mørch – DP-8

Mørch DP-8 tonearm

On the 4th of July 1981, Hans Henrik Mørch sent out a new tonearm to his auditioners. It was a prototype, a UP-4 modified to have greatly improved deep bass performance.

But at that time audio equipment was not very concerned with the deep bass reproduction of vinyl records – the auditioners did not hear much improvement, and the project was abandoned. Somewhat ironically the introduction of digital audio helped advance the quality of deep bass – for instance, subwoofers are now commonplace.

After 25 years the old prototype was dusted off and eventually became the DP-8. The improvements in deep bass and dynamics are now evident.

For this new model the effective mass for the horizontal mode of motion is many times larger than the effective mass for the vertical mode of motion – no matter the effective mass of the armtube used. This provides for tremendous improvements in bass response and a lot more dynamics.

The DP-8 got the Golden Ear Award in The Absolute Sound June/July issue 2010. In the article, the author refers to the DP-8 as “anisotropic”, which is a short technical way of characterising the new features.

Read more about it on the DP-8 product page on the Mørch-website, where the anisotropic principle is also explained, and in the reviews.